The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [323]
Kennedy had opened a spigot, and he was discovering, to his increasing discomfort, that it was next to impossible to close it down to a meaningless trickle. He was the commander in chief, but this policy was now riding him as much as he was riding it. He was trying to signal that he had not yet decided whether he was willing to unleash these forces that he had allowed to build up. He was discovering, however, that indecision is sometimes the greatest decision of all. He left the two-hour meeting still saying that he had not made up his mind, but it would take an immense, wrenching force to shut down the invasion now.
I hear you don’t think much of this business,” Bobby told Schlesinger on April 11 at Ethel’s birthday party. “You may be right or you may be wrong, but the president has made his mind up. Don’t push it any further. Now is the time for everyone to help him all they can.”
Despite what Bobby said, the president was still full of doubts. Kennedy was, if anything, looking for those who would confirm his doubts, but he had no one left in the White House who dared to speak to those misgivings. Schlesinger had been the most articulate and persuasive skeptic among Kennedy’s aides. In the White House he was a surrogate for tough-minded, anti-Communist American liberals everywhere. But even before his talk with the attorney general, Schlesinger had proudly taken his first flight as a hawk.
The day before, Schlesinger had written a nine-page, single-spaced memo for the president. The former Harvard professor saw himself as representing a humane counterbalance to the CIA and the Defense Department, but if he had ever been that, the historian had quickly learned a different language. Despite what Schlesinger believed, there was no epic struggle going on in the White House, with the humane academic idealist standing on one side and against him the evil twins: the State Department, with what Schlesinger called its “entrenched Cold War ways,” and next to it the all-powerful, duplicitous “military-intelligence complex.” There was a struggle, but it was for power among aides like Schlesinger who were stumbling over each other in their rush to get close to Kennedy and, in the end, narrowing the spectrum of voices that reached the president’s ear.
In his important memo, Schlesinger wrote of what he called the “cover operation.” Schlesinger and other American liberals idealized Adlai Stevenson, the noble prince of their faith. Yet Schlesinger called for his beloved Stevenson to get up in the United Nations and say that though “we sympathize with these patriotic Cubans … there will be no American participation in any military aggression against Castro’s Cuba.” The historian said that if forced, Stevenson would “presumably … be obliged to deny any such CIA activity.”
Schlesinger realized that the Cubans would have strong arguments to make: “If Castro flies a group of captured Cubans to New York to testify that they were organized and trained by CIA, we will have to be prepared to show that the alleged CIA personnel were errant idealists or soldiers of fortune working on their own.” These captured soldiers would presumably have been only a sample of others still in Cuba clinging to their American patrons to save them from execution or years in prison. And Schlesinger was willing to tear away their fingers.
“When lies must be told, they should be told by subordinate officials,” Schlesinger wrote. “At no point should the President be asked to lend himself to the cover operation. “ Schlesinger was in agreement with the secretary of State who apparently had first proposed that some other official should “make the final decision and do so in his [Kennedy’s] absence—someone whose head